Widen Your Lens
Our view of social issues is far too narrow to ever accomplish anything meaningful.
Each individual brings their own unique lens to a conversation, we all have our unique life experiences that shape the way we see and interpret things. This means that many of us can see the same exact thing and take away different things from that experience because we are shaped by our own lenses. When this happens we tend to get tunnel vision around certain issues, especially ones we are passionate about, and we see it through our lens and only how it will affect things within our lens. We forget there is a world outside what we see directly, actions have consequences that some of us will never see and actions may be taken for reasons that some of us can’t fathom because they’re outside our lived reality. For this reason we fall short when organizing for social change and we fail at affecting change where it matters because we can’t widen our lens or take a step back and fully assess what matters around an issue.
An issue that comes to mind and is very relevant right now is the overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court and the ensuing battles nationwide about reproductive rights. The snowball effect went a little like this: decision that abortion is not protected by the United States Constitution, states now have control over abortion access for its own residents, states use language that is not clear on at what point is abortion allowed for the health of the mother, doctors do not perform lifesaving procedures on patients for fear of going to prison, women die in the 21st century when medicine should be able to easily lower maternal mortality rates. Pro-life subscribers looked at this issue with a narrow lens, they think abortion is murder and want to stop babies from being killed. They don’t take a step back, widen their lens, and look at all of the implications of the language of these bills and the creation of abortion procedures as healthcare.
Looking at specifically the actions of the Supreme Court in the decision above, their narrow lens and interpretation of the law and Constitution also presents issues that we will be facing as a country in the very near future. Saying that there should be a direct and literal translation of the Constitution and citing that as a reason for the overturn will domino to other issues and previous Supreme Court decisions. That reasoning does away with rulings on cases like Loving v. Virginia which prohibits states from making laws about interracial marriages and Obergefell v. Hodges which prohibits states from preventing same sex couples to be married and requires them to recognize same sex marriages performed outside the state. Nowhere in the Constitution does it explicitly say the United States government protects gay couples or interracial couples, just like nowhere does it explicitly say that abortion is protected healthcare. This narrow view of the law has many consequences outside of what our outraged public initially saw.
Our flaw is in our quickness to react based on our initial interpretations. We need to pause, step back, have healthy conversations with as many people as possible, and truly listen to each other and value the information we can gain from different lenses when we talk about these issues. Everything is more complex than we initially see, everything is multifaceted and we can only see those faces by working with others who have a different lens than we do.
